By David Futrelle
Three white supremacists have been charged with attempted murder after one of them fired at a group of antifascist counterprotesters after a speech by neo-Nazi celebrity Richard Spencer at the University of Florida in Gaineville yesterday.
The Miami Herald reports:
Just before 5:30 p.m., just as protesters outside Spencer’s speech at UF’s Phillips Center were wrapping up, Gainesville police said the trio started heckling some anti-Spencer protesters with Hitler chants, Nazi salutes and threats. At one point, cops said, convicted felon Tenbrink pulled out a gun and the brothers encouraged him to use it.
He fired a single shot that missed the group, police said, then sped off in a silver Jeep. An off-duty Alachua County Sheriff’s Office deputy spotted the car 20 miles out of town around 9 p.m. and arrested the group. The Fears brothers are held on million dollar bonds in the Alachua County jail. Tenbrink’s is $3 million.
Surprise, surprise: Two of the three were amongst the alleged “very fine people” marching with their fellow white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Tenbrink, 28, and William Fears, 30, were spotted at Charlottesville, the site of the largest white nationalist gathering in years that erupted in violence. Fears identifies himself on Twitter as “Charismatic leader of a White breeding cult” and tweeted “blood and soil,” the notorious Nazi slogan.
This is terrorism, plain and simple. It’s appalling the story isn’t getting more attention in the media.
Here are some tweets with more details on what happened.
3 white supremacists arrested in Florida for shooting at anti-racism protesters https://t.co/zn6bUBqFK3
— Vox (@voxdotcom) October 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/efoster_eric/status/921495556790325248
“Kill them”: Three men charged in shooting after Richard Spencer speech https://t.co/gqCXtWSmD3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 20, 2017
And these three aren’t the only violent white supremacists who should be getting a lot more attention from the press — and the cops.
Who are the white supremacists assaulting people at rallies in Berkeley, Charlottesville and Huntington Beach? We found some of them: pic.twitter.com/fL5yzyI8Om
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2017
A Cali racist group—the Rise Above Movement_is full of violent felons. Law enforcement pays it little attention: https://t.co/8AFZS9HVsO
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2017
The ProPublica piece is a long one but I think a necessary read for anyone concerned with the rise of a violent fascist movement in US.
— 🏳️🌈Spacedad (@SuperSpacedad) October 20, 2017
My thoughts exactly.
Meanwhile, everyone in the White House continues to lie about Trump’s shockingly callous treatment of a grieving Gold Star mother and the congresswoman who has stood up for her.
Specifically, this entire John Kelly story is fiction. Not one bit of it actually happened. pic.twitter.com/eGSQU0S3wc
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/921452065338953729
Hey @realDonaldTrump I know how much you love calling out FAKE NEWS so here’s your daughter-in-law quoting a transcript that doesn't exist. https://t.co/TheR8FGrWY
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 20, 2017
"He knew what he signed up for"
Kelly: I told him to say it
DJT: I didn't say it
LaraT: I saw the transcript
Sanders: There's no transcript— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) October 20, 2017
Don TrumpJr. has thrown himself into the fray though he apparently has trouble telling black women apart.
https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/921064156610088962
Rachel Maddow has a pretty convincing theory on why Trump doesn’t want to talk about Niger: that the 4 US soldiers died in part as a result of the Trump administration alienating the government of Chad, which pulled its troops out of Niger after Trump put the country (a longtime ally in the war on terror) on his alleged non-Muslim ban list for an extremely stupid reason.
Maddow connects the dots on how Trump adding Chad to his travel ban may have gotten soldiers killed in Niger https://t.co/PYk203GxVM
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 20, 2017
In a whole other arena of terrible, things are even worse in Puerto Rico than official reports acknowledge:
Real death toll in Puerto Rico is probably 450 — much higher than official count https://t.co/msCyhMDyyQ
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) October 18, 2017
But our country still has its heroes. Along with Rep. Wilson and all those working diligently to save lives in Puerto Rico, there is this dude:
A man in an apartment on Connecticut Ave. mooned President Trump’s motorcade to the Embassy of Kuwait tonight, per the pool report pic.twitter.com/ifGC8ycXat
— Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) October 19, 2017
Here are some cute animals because we all need more of them this week. And every week these days, frankly.
everything is terrible so here’s a baby lion cub learning to roar pic.twitter.com/JZpZGj69FJ
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 18, 2017
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/921260735119970307
https://twitter.com/ItsMeowIRL/status/921245209526132742
One of my other childhood kitties, Bijou loved Ben-Gay and other creams that you rub on sore muscles and would try to lick you if you had it on. Dracarys loves my oatmeal and shay butter lotion. I wait until it’s absorbed into my skin a little bit and then let her lick my hand.
@Treeperson
Someone doing what is in the first part of the article you linked gives cops and anti terror types the night sweats. It’s not a low probability risk. 🙁
Edited to make it clearer that I was referring to Treeperson’s link – not David’s OP.
Since we’re on the topic of genocide-mongers, fake news and click bait are helping actual genocide. Who needs to censor everything when you can hire a couple of trolls to write and spread worthless articles that are preferable to the truth? Not only can it win elections, it can also help get rid of your neighbors!
Fun tip: If you replace, “Rohingya” with “Jews” and, “Myanmar” with, “Germany” in the article, the text sounds awfully similar to a similar incident which happened in the past with another disenfranchised minority. I imagine that current events will get the same belated response.
Dear David,
Here is a blog that is pretty extreme white supremacist :
https://paworldandtimes.wordpress.com/2017/10/19/why-you-shouldnt-race-mix/
The blogger is a longtime Heartiste commenter. He is an immigrant from Poland, yet says that all nonwhites should be expelled from America.
But he is quite fragile, and will probably quit blogging if you expose him a couple of times.
Just realized. 4 pages of comments and no one has made the connection between incels being huge Trump supporters and Trump’s ban on Chad visas …. 😛
@dreemr *wry grin* My son is so easygoing usually that my kneejerk reaction takes me by surprise. 😛
^ Hahahaha. No more Chads!
They must have loved Bush. Didn’t he hang some Chads in Florida? It was all over the news.
Scary thought: there’s likely a decent contingent of incels who were born after the hanging and dimpling of the chads. Certainly many, perhaps most, were too young to understand it at the time.
We’re old, Alan.
@ numberobis
Well, somebody has to be; those clouds won’t yell at themselves.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3822360/cub-scout-kicked-out-gun-control/
I thought this was especially interesting:
@ Jesalin
Don’t want to be splainy, but as someone from a place with pretty strict gun laws and 550 homicides* last year, I’d like to challenge that.
(* That’s still too many, but even so…)
No, Alan. You splain. You splain to that gun-fondlin’ republican jerk until you can’t splain no more.
Not that he’d listen. But it’d be so damn cathartic to hear a well-spoken English lawyer tear bloody strips out of a smug Republican politician. Gives me shivers, it does.
@Alan
A simple comparison of crime rates/murders/number of mass shootings between Canada* and the US would show her statement to be a lie.
*Or pretty much any other developed nation.
According to a quick Wiki search, the US homicide rate is 4.88 per 100K compared to .92 for the UK. We’ve got higher rates than most of Europe and most of Asia. From a quick scan, the murder rate in the US is high compared to the other wealthy countries and gun culture seems a likely culprit for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
That bullshit about lots of guns reducing crime is so easily refuted, yet they keep repeating the lie over and over again.
I don’t know why ANYONE would think that having items designed solely for murder* readily available throughout a society would decrease murder. That is a level of disconnection from reality which gives me the cold sweats.
*You can do other things with a knife. Cut meat, open envelopes, whittle some wood…a gun does literally one thing. It kills things by blowing holes in them.
Sorry, a wee bit late and the thread appears to have moved on, but just had to express my delight: I love it when Mammotheers swap cat stories.
Also, here are the teenager kittehs, boppin’ to Buttercup’s song:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SsnLzpQXWaU/UY8Dw3kTNEI/AAAAAAAAHvM/nQhQ8ulZFN0/s1600/lolcats-if-we-had-thumb.jpg
Glad to read the kitty + fave foods stories here 🙂
And Valentin, I am glad to hear your kitty is doing better too.
I don’t have any pets but I can throw in a tale here, a dog tale, it was a friend’s Auntie or someone she knew.
These people had two Basset Hounds. Which are “low to the ground”. So one day they went off to work or out or whatever, and they left two boxes, of a dozen each, of Dunkin Donuts on the kitchen counter. Which would be about? 3 foot high?
Somehow, these dogs managed to climb up there and get the donuts. And they ate all of them.
Doggies were ok 🙂
If memory serves, they were like conked out on the kitchen floor when the people got home, and I think they took them to a vet right away, but they were ok. Ate too much but were ok.
I seem to remember a part of this story about the vet laughing too, how did they do it?
I too would like to know how they managed to climb up there and get the donuts.
Must’ve been a great feast since they ate all of them 🙂
Z&T,
That basset hound tale is adorbs. I wonder if one stood on the other so they could reach the donuts?
Basset hounds remind me of munchkin cats:
*Dies of teh cute*
@Z&T
I had room mate in college who’s dog did this. When I found the box, there was nothing left, not a single dusting of powder, nothing! The dog was fine but you would think she was starving the way she consumed those donuts.
Trying a picture – just as a reminder that cats are very much other directed. 😛
http://i.imgur.com/IysG6wl.gif
Yay! It worked. Plus it always makes me laugh.
Sorry for the double post:
Twitter is cracking down on hate speech. Again. Isn’t this like the third time they’ve said they’ll do something about it?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/twitter-has-a-timeline-for-stamping-out-revenge-porn-violent-tweets/
@Violet the Vile
If you don’t think too hard about it, and gun fondlers don’t seem very interested in doing that, it seems obvious that guns should make everything better. Surely everyone would stop committing crimes against other people or their places of residence or work if there was a good chance of being shot dead, right? Because all crimes against people and property are done clearly and openly and with plenty of time for the victim or a bystander to grab a weapon and deliver kinetic justice.
Gun fondlers don’t seem to consider how difficult it is to safely and effectively protect yourself using a gun, especially against anyone else with a gun, especially if they get the drop on you, especially if they know what they’re doing.
Guns are pretty shitty for defense. Good for posturing, threatening and escalating arguments, though.
@Pie Since guns are part of my job, I’ll comment, if I may.
Like everything else, guns have their season.
You out and about? Shitty.
Guns are not only shitty for the very reasons you describe, but can actively increase your chances of a toe tag – either it’s taken away from you or. more likely, the cops get there and see a gun and, lets just say, they need some work on their fast threat assessment.
In your home and dealing with a threat from someone already in your home – family, friend, plumber? Shitty.
Increased toe tag chances again, since they either know it’s there too or have a high chance of taking it away from you in the close quarters.
In your home and someone trying to break in? Useful.
You do tend to have the time to retrieve it and get set in that case.
Out and about and an animal attacks you? (Don’t forget – this is a non trivial problem in some areas) Mixed.
If you see the animal coming, you have the chance to get ready. However, actual usefulness depends on both being able to see the attack coming and having calibre enough for the job. A .22 will stop a person in one or two shots, but you can fire one all day at a grizzly and it’ll just piss them off (slight exaggeration for effect 😛 )
So yeah – the vast majority of the time, a gun is a less optimal defence strategy. The only real advantage to having a gun is it’s a hell of a sight quicker to learn than self defence, and needs less maintenance.